I've been thinking about the recent debates on this site over whether to interpret certain manga as being about transness when the manga isn't explicit about it. I agree with this post by @Wiwaxia that these arguments are quite similar to arguments about whether a work is Yuri or Subtext. I think part of the problem here (though certainly not the entirety of it) is that there isn't a widely-agreed upon "Trans Subtext" tag like there is for yuri subtext.

I propose that the recently created Ambiguous gender tag be used for this purpose. Essentially, we should use it for manga where a major character can be plausibly interpreted as trans but this isn't explicitly stated in the narrative, such as Momiji and Kouyou or The Guy She Likes is a #CrossdressingBoy. This is a subjective judgment, of course, but whether or not a work is Yuri or Subtext is also fairly subjective so that's only to be expected. In cases where the manga contains a romance with a clearly female character (like in the above two), I propose that we include neither the Het nor the Yuri tag but just the Romance one. I believe this is a compromise that most users of this site can at least live with.

I agree with all of these proposals. I think this is the best way going forward and oftentimes (using both of these works as examples) engagement with a work benefits when readers don't just limit their understanding of a character read to just "assigned sex with a presentation change on top" in every case but understand that the intention of a lot of these works is to look beyond a character's "assigned sex" in the first place, i.e. if someone believes "trans" is too "concrete" a label this is also true for "cis gnc" being too "concrete" a label. Ambiguous gender makes ambiguous sex/gender itself and captures all of these experiences. It can also operate alongside Cross-dressing and Transgender tags rather than being replacements for them.

It's done T_T such a cute ending. I love their clothes at the end. Minori Chigusa-sensei with another banger, I will follow you to the ends of the earth.

A seriously unbelievably devastating and beautiful set of chapters these last few have been. I've found myself tearing up whenever I read this work... Igarashi Jun I need you to have all the flowers and money in the world.

It looks like this work is going in the direction of either Ao liking both boys and girls but falling for a trans genderfluid Momiji (girlfriend) + Kouyou (boyfriend) (the "Momiji & Kouyou System"? accidental plurality in this work?) or Ao indeed just liking girls but Kouyou is slowly becoming the trans girl Momiji in full time. Very interesting development. I think this chapter warrants the addition of the Ambiguous gender tag (the "I am a real girl" is pretty clear cut imo in this work's thesis: that Momiji is a real girl even when Kouyou is separately a boy, and Ao is put in the place of figuring out who she likes by seeing the girl and the boy version of the same person). Curious to see where this goes!

The argument in favour of the trans reading appears to be an experiential and subtextual one that uses the text's scenes and slurs but one which does take liberty with the translation, and the argument in favour of the strictly-cis-not-trans (that is to say, transness is totally absent, not just "cis or trans") reading appears to rely on a strict and literal reading of individual words while avoiding the experiential context of what's depicted, and broad assumptions of authorial intent as intentionally lacking in subtext ("cis unless unless said otherwise") or declarative notions of a single interpretation as the "true theme of the work" ("it has nothing to do with gender or transness, just preferences").

Generally to me these standards are held much higher for this topic than standards for tagging relationships in general (yuri, het, yaoi, or otherwise), which to me feels like an obvious and persistent double standard. I don't think ElPsyKongroo has some kind of conspiracy intent to push an agenda rather than acknowledge and incorporate the context of both aspects here, especially for English readers and their social context and especially when in general experiences of transness and gender nonconformity do in fact overlap (especially in a society like Japan which is more conservative on gender and transness in general but also has existed in a dialogue with global & Western relationships to gender for 200 years now - the constant distinction between "the West" and "Japan" here as totally alien to each other with regards to navigations of transness always carries an orientalist lens even if unintended), and I think it's questionable to ascribe this motivation to "change the original because the original was believed to be lacking", this wouldn't have been translated if that were the case.

A lot of the times, people taking the strictly conservative (in the textual reading sense, not the political sense) stance of avoiding the context of subtext in both interpretation and translation tend to bring forth their own biases on which kinds of people are "the default in society unless said otherwise", when as discussed above, characters serve as functions and aren't real people, and quite a few works on Dynasty Scans already treat authorial intent as secondary to audience interpretation or tag navigation (this is why certain tags exist in the first place, such as Ambiguous Gender or Subtext).

The tagging of this as both Cross-dressing and Transgender seems to satisfy the function of the tags while incorporating both justifications, even while people can continue to debate in the comments their interpretations (art is meant to be discussed and debated, not treated as solely fixed). So I generally don't really see the argument against it, unless you're arguing from character ontology or authorial intent, in which case much of the site would require a tagging revision.

On the topic of labels: I don't think Western readers (or Japanese ones, for that matter), need someone to outright declare Their Identity or Label for them to embody experiences one may characterize with being named a particular identity or label, the opposite is the argument being made. The argument often made against the former (that one doesn't have to always be a strict label, I agree) indirectly pushes, effectively, that trans people don't ever exist textually unless a label is placed on them as "trans", but that the label itself "constrains" rather than "names experience". This subtly brings forth a double-bind, where transness does not exist in a work until it is named, but naming transness supposedly constrains things (for whom?).

But the argument people make for pro-trans readings is one that doesn't need to name transness to recognize experiences of transness as subtext, even when experiences of transness can coexist in ambiguity with experiences of broader cis gender-nonconformity. In a broader sense, the argument for reading characters as trans is the argument to acknowledge that trans experiences are material experiences of life even some "cis gnc" people may move through (a cis person questioning their gender is always a material experience of transness even if the cis person thereafter decides they are not trans). Trans people and cis people are, of course, not two different species.

The reason works like these tend to cause such a stir in comments has less to do with any issues with the work or the author themselves and much more to do with audience discomfort at acknowledging the overlap between experiences of gender nonconformity and experiences of transness (and especially transfemininity), and how arguments about tagging turn into discussions on character ontology. But characters can't speak for themselves, characters are not human, tagging serves human functions, the author is a human in the context of their life, the audience is a set of human beings (who may have differing interpretations on a character, but some of whom are trans people who agree that this being tagged as Trans would function for the purposes of the tag, strictly from a pragmatic perspective). Inevitably, art that resonates is often going to be ambiguous, because art is never just strictly the author's solipsism but a social relationship that communicates. The irony of course is that everyone in the comments really likes this work and would love to see more of it. Hence, I think the Girly Debut Protocol for this work is the best option here, which still leaves enough room for ambiguity.

I feel like as both "yuri" and "cross-dressing" works continue to grow in popularity, and quite obviously touch upon experiences that real lesbians/bi women and real trans people experience in real life within both the Japanese and Western context, and works incorporate this, then of course it makes sense that more queer people and trans people see their experiences depicted so literally in fiction as tied to or drawing from their lives and experiences. The slur in Japanese (that is translated here to tr*nny") is of course a word with a real-life history. This is going to keep happening, so it's better to figure out how to deal with this ambiguity and coexistence now.

Long post! Don't read this as negative or anything, I just wanted to lay down my views on the above. But since it's getting sticky (as it does for any works of this type, unfortunately) it might be best to wait for moderator decisions on tagging.

last edited at Sep 9, 2026 9:27AM

IMO, while this author doesn't do this with this work, in general, explanations by cis authors to hastily protect the cisness of characters and deliberately & defensively foreclose the ambiguity of possible trans interpretations specifically in situations where we see dysphoria and anti-trans slurs in the text aren't to be taken as politically neutral statements (and of course, characters are characters not people so they can't say if they're cis or trans) rather than the societal influence of transphobia on them, in the same sense (cis & trans) female characters can be depicted in certain misogynistic ways and authors try to justify it by anthropomorphization. Watsonian explanations vs. Doylist explanations, and such. Just as one is correct to argue that a cross-dresser may use she/her pronouns, one is also correct to say many trans girls also call themselves boys sometimes (boymoder, etc) or are called crossdressing boys by others, so the position goes both ways. There was an Otokonoko-subculture pop-up cafe in Tokyo a few weeks ago where a quite number of the hostesses were out trans women. Ambiguity here is ambiguity of the terms and life experiences.

Either way, for tagging purposes the addition of the Transgender tag seems very clear cut: lots of comments see the interpretation and recognition here, doesn't mean having to take off the Cross-dressing tag because they can coexist for searching purposes and because cross-dressing is a big part of the story, she/her pronouns get used in this English translation (this was a deliberate contextual choice), anti-trans slurs and dysphoria are depicted, etc. To me, this is pretty much subtext, and not putting the Transgender tag on a work like this would definitely deprive people who might look for works on that tag for trans experiences from something that clearly resonates with a lot of trans people (as we see in the comment section), and tagging systems are first and foremost about searching to find content we like and resonate with.

last edited at Sep 8, 2026 10:01PM

This was very cute! I liked the way the progression moved and they are really sweet together, and a lot of the emotional hits were done beautifully. It was certainly personally relatable in many ways. I'd love to see a full series about these two.

I'm not quite sure how tagging works (edit: figured it out! thanks. I'll leave this here for others to see if they may share my views or disagree), but I personally propose the "Girly Debut Protocol" for a work like this:

• Keep the "Cross-dressing" tag
• Add the "Transgender" tag
• Add the recently-minted "Ambiguous gender" tag (https://dynasty-scans.com/tags/ambiguous_gender)
• Add the "Romance" tag
• Either: Remove the "Het" tag altogether (my strong preference, like Girly Debut. You can also make arguments for why a relationship between these two characters isn't really seen as Het in society anyway), or (more controversially, and I prefer the former option, but I can see the argument for this so I'll suggest it) add both the "Het" and "Yuri" tags [NOT because a relationship with a trans girl is het or het+yuri, but because this is strictly for search availability purposes for people who may consider this hetgem rather than yurigem. I'd personally prefer if it were just tagged "Yuri", but of course that's just entirely based on my interpretation rather than the text's ambiguity and the searching function of Dynasty].

My reasoning is that tags are fundamentally about searching for works on Dynasty's database itself via the tagging system, and are additive (that is to say, a work will appear for any tag), so for practical purposes, this system should work for people looking for both "Transgender" and "Cross-dressing" (though I agree the character strongly reads as a trans girl) and doesn't pin a sexuality label on their relationship.

last edited at Sep 8, 2026 8:07PM